« November 2003 | Main | January 2004 »
December 30, 2003
Coming home
We took Esther home from the hospital today. She's a tremendous
joy, and a wonderful New Year's present for our family.
Thank you
to everyone who sent email or commented on the previous entry!
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 26, 2003
Esther Ann Werbach
Our daughter Esther was born today at 12:56pm. We're all doing
well, and feeling very excited about the new addition to the
family. Here are some photos.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Esther Ann Werbach
Born December 26, 2003
12:56pm
7 pounds, 7 ounces
Mother, daughter, and the rest of the family are doing great.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 24, 2003
See you in a bit....
In addition to the standard holiday break, we're expecting our second
child in a couple days. I don't expect to blog again until the
bundle of joy (gender unknown) makes its appearance.
Best wishes to all for a happy holiday and New Year!
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The next little W
We're getting ready for the arrival of Eli's brother or sister, aka
"Little W in training." The delivery is scheduled for December
26. I'll post photos here as soon as I can!
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 23, 2003
Technorelativity
Cory Doctorow: "The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy."
A nice formulation, but, with all due respect, a wrong one.
Technology and policy are always intertwined. Both of them always
matter. Was the Napster saga "about" peer-to-peer technology, or
the current state of copyright law and the music industry? Was
the rapid growth of the commercial Internet in the US "about" advances
in data networking or enlightened FCC policies? The danger lies
in thinking about either element in a vacuum. Geeks and the
technology industry love to think they can ignore policy battles, which
is just as misguided as policy-makers thinking they can adopt laws
without regard to technological reality.
"Policy" here has several meanings. It includes not only laws and
regulations, but the subtler policies imposed by private organizations
and software code. For
example, social networking services will succeed or fail based on how
well their policies map to latent user expectations, not just their
technology.
I'm finishing up a fascinating (albeit overly verbose) book, Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time,
by Peter Galiston, that illustrates this point in a completely
different context. The book situates Albert Einstein's theory of
special relativity within the 19th-century effort to fix longitude and
simultaneous time between distant clocks. Relativity was not just
a theory of physics; it had deep roots in both metaphysical philosophy
and practical engineering. Einstein succeeded because he was able
to join these worlds without being overly nostalgic about any of
them.
Cory is right about one thing. Policy battles will be crucial to
the future of the technology industry over the next twenty years.
If these battles are to be resolved productively, we need to keep
pushing both sides to acknowledge the significance of the other.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 22, 2003
A fine mess
James DeLong: "The [Verizon] decision also ensures that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
will be reopened in the next Congress, which will create a thorough
mess."
A thorough mess perhaps, but a necessary one. The DMCA is so
clearly out of step with reality that reopining it is inevitable.
However, I won't dismiss the possiblity that the "reopening" process
will lead to something worse.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Fiber to the home deployment schedule
Reuters: "Verizon said Monday that its initial [fiber] deployment plans involve about 1
million homes next year, with the pace potentially doubling in 2005."
So let's see. Verizon has 30 million residential
customers. If they pass 1 million homes with fiber in 2004 and
double that to 2 million per year in 2005, they'll light everyone up by
2020. Assuming they actually deploy this time, unlike prior telco
fiber promises.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 19, 2003
Save the date -- Supernova 2004
Supernova 2004, my conference on the decentralization of software, communications, and media, will be held June 24-25
in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first two Supernovas were
incredibly successful, and this one should be the best yet. Stay
tuned for more details.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 18, 2003
Qwest CEO on VOIP regulation
Qwest CEO Dick Notebaert comes out in support of treating voice over IP as a largely unregulated "information service" in a Washington Times op-ed.
Qwest is unique among the incumbent local phone giants, since it has a
large Internet backbone and business services operation. Still,
it's good to see a telco CEO reject applying legacy regulation to
VOIP.
The one point Notebaert's op-ed doesn't squarely address is whether
VOIP should be subject to the inflated "access charges" that companies
like Qwest charge to originate or terminate telephone traffic.
The implication of classing VOIP as an information service is that
access charges should not apply, and that's the right result.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
In defense of openness
Progress and Freedom Foundation president Ray Gifford takes issue with my advocacy
of broadband openness. Ray is a very knowledgeable commentator on
technology policy, and a former state public utility commission chair,
so I take his objections seriously. His argument is that even
though "openness" is a nice thing, regulatory intervention to require
it would have costs and is "premature, at best."
This misses the thrust of my argument. Openness isn't some
abstract principle invented by Larry Lessig to justify new regulation;
it's a particular technical and policy framework that is deeply
embedded in the Internet and existing FCC rules. The Internet is open
not through government mandates, but because it is architected to avoid
the need for them. Companies can compete vigorously, because no
matter how successful they become, others can still overtake
them.
That vital, competitive, unregulated space, however, rides on top of
physical transport networks subject to very different economics.
At best, the broadband last mile is a duopoly. For many Americans
like myself who can't get either cable modem or DSL service, it's a
monopoly. I hope and expect that will change, largely due to
innovation in wireless, but let's not kid ourselves. It will be
years before any alternate broadband access platform has the reach and
capabilities of cable or telephone wires.
The genius of the Internet's design is that it abstracts out that
physical infrastructure. The Internet starts with IP, which can
run on any digital network. The genius of the FCC's Computer
Inquiry rules, first adopted in their present form in 1980 and embedded
in the 1996 Telecommunication Act, is that they adopt the same
approach. Underlying basic services are differentiated from
competitive information services. Bottleneck transport networks
must provide open interconnection and must not restrict user choice of
applications, devices, and content. From there, everyone can compete on
a level playing field.
It's important to understand that this open connectivity model is
fundamentally deregulatory. It's not a new form of regulatory
interventionism, as Gifford implies. It's about opening up new
minimally regulated spaces for competition and innovation on top of the
bottleneck physical infrastructure. That competition and
innovation, in turn, will stimulate deployment and competitive entry at
lower levels. Hence, the dynamism of the Internet spurred cable
operators to invest in building a second broadband access platform into
the home, which in turn forced local phone companies to invest in
DSL.
Where Gifford fears new regulation, I fear abandonment of a model that
has proven extraordinarily successful. The argument incumbents
are making today is that the Internet model is a failure. The
only business model that will work for broadband, they claim, is the
cable TV model: one provider controlling both access and content.
Without incentives to create such walled gardens, they say, they won't
invest in building out their infrastructure.
I'm not ready to pick winners yet. I think the FCC should
maintain and adapt its long-standing open connectivity model for the
emerging broadband world.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
VOIP: you can take it with you
Om Malik reports that Vonage is developing a softphone voice-over-WiFi client. They won't be the first. Telesym offers voice over WiFi targeted at the enterprise market, SJ Labs offers a free softphone client, and Mobitus,
a spinoff of Canadian hotspot provider FatPort, just launched a VOIP
softphone offering. But given Vonage's customer base, brand, and
infrastructure, it's uniquely positioned to make softphone service
successful.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 17, 2003
Pushing back to the edges
Donna Wentworth points to several good responses to Stratton Sclavos' comments about recentralizing the Net that I mentioned last week.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Spam and the open Net
BusinessWeek discusses the threat that spam represents to Internet openness, a topic I wrote about four months ago and again two months ago.
It's a comprehensive, measured piece. But the mainstream press
still doesn't yet see the connection to other attacks on the Net's open
architecture, especially at the infrastructure level.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Syndication in consumer electronics
An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) vindicates the Harvard Business Review piece
I published three years ago on syndication as the business model for
the digital age. I was focused on e-commerce, but the same dynamics are
hitting businesses in the very physical consumer electronics
industry. Companies like Sony and Philips are starting to provide
components and services to other manufacturers, rather than insisting
on doing everything themselves.
Though a flat-panel TV can only be sold once, unlike a digital asset,
it is still subject to the other two legs of my syndication tripod:
modularity and many independent distribution points. AKA
commoditization and globalization, the focal points of the
Wall Street Journal article.
Om Malik has some additional comments and a link to an article he wrote in Business 2.0.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 16, 2003
The battle for open broadband
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps had an op-ed yesterday in the San Jose Mercury News about the threat upcoming FCC decisions could pose to the open Internet:
FCC is buying into a warped vision that open networks should be
replaced by closed networks and that the FCC should excuse broadband
providers from longstanding non-discrimination requirements."
I'm also growing increasingly concerned
about the direction the FCC is taking. Just as broadband
deployment is taking off, and new applications as VOIP are beginning to
thrive on top of the broadband platform, the FCC is moving to tilt the
rules of the game away from innovators and toward incumbents.
I have great respect for FCC Chairman Powell's intelligence and integrity, and as I've written,
I don't see him as a mindless tool of big business. He is one of
the few people in Washington who sees the coming transformation of
telecom for what it is.
The problem is that the FCC doesn't seem to fully appreciate what
"voice is just an application" implies. It means broadband
transport and what rides on top are separate markets. Competition
on top depends on open connectivity to what lies beneath, where two
companies in each market still control the critical last-mile
bottleneck. As much as those companies have complained, they have
made the investments and successfully built broadband access businesses
under the current pro-competitive FCC rules. Yet now they insist
they won't invest without the ability to control what happens at the
application and content layers.
The incumbents (and, it seems, the FCC) have it exactly
backwards. Today, we don't need a new set of incentives for
companies to deliver broadband transport; we need incentives to create
broadband applications. And competition is the best possible incentive.
Competition at the application layer will stimulate demand for more
bandwidth at the physical layer. That's how we'll catch up to
places like Japan and Korea that are rolling out 27 and 50 megabit
broadband connections. Giving up on competition in applications
in the hope that the bottleneck transport providers will deploy bundled
services makes no sense. It runs counter to all the lessons we
should have learned from the success of the narrowband Internet.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Longhorn as the killer app for syndication?
If no one else gets there first, widespread RSS syndication on the
desktop will arrive in two years courtesy of Microsoft. Not
convinced? Go read Scoble.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Treo-trendiness?
Om Malik: "If 2003 was the year of Ipoddery, then 2004 could be a year of Treo-trendiness."
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Blogs as social networking tools.
Arnold Kling responds to
my post questioning the value of social networking services by offering
another reason to doubt that well-connected people need them.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Mythologies of control
Ed Felten observes that
the Net's connection to the physical world makes it unlikely to become
a tool for total control by companies or governments:
He has a point. The problem, though, is that policy-makers aren't seeing the analogy he makes. The content industries, for example, have successfully focused attention on the threat of digital "piracy," as though no one ever made a mix tape from a CD before the Net came along.
The ideology of the digital copyright extremists, as well as some in
the trusted computing community, is one of total control. Any
slack in the system for users to do what they want would have to be
explicitly granted in their of the world. As David Weinberger argued
in Wired a few months back, that's a strange and dangerous
notion. It's a good thing to recognize the Net's connection to
the physical world, because the physical world has inherent checks and
balances.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 15, 2003
Nickel-sized hard drives
Toshiba has developed a hard drive
the size of a nickel capable of holding 1 gigabyte or more of
data. These are the kinds of advances that will drive more
intelligence into handheld devices like mobile phones.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Clarification on social networking software
LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman sent me a detailed note over the weekend responding to my post on social networking services.
He pointed out that LinkedIn's new tool for uploading Outlook contacts
doesn't automatically send an invitation to everyone in your address
book. You have to select the people to invite from a list.
Reid also noted that unlike Spoke, LinkedIn only considers someone a
connection if you have either invited them to establish a relationship
or accepted a connection request. By automatically inferring
relationships from email messages you've sent and received, Spoke
generates a much larger network, but in so doing it includes many
relationships that really aren't personal connections.
These are good points. Reid is a passionate believer in what he's
doing, and the design choices in LinkedIn have been thought through to
anticipate many issues that could arise. (So have those in Spoke,
with different outcomes.) However, my concerns remain.
Social networking services are still least useful to the most connected
people. And I'm still looking for a situation where one of them
provides me with some concrete value.
I maintain an open mind on this. I really want to see services
like LinkedIn, Tribe.net, and Spoke succeed. (As well as services
that aren't social networking but have similar elements, like SocialText,
where I'm on the advisory board.) I'll keep fiddling with these
tools in the hope they achieve more of their exciting potential.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 14, 2003
Will the real VOIP please stand up?
David Beckemeyer has a nice post clarifying the distinction between the current voice over broadband deployments and "real" end-to-end voice over IP (via James Seng).
However, it's important not to dismiss the former because it relies on
interconnection with the old public switched telephone network.
Voice over broadband, which is what Vonage and most of the recent
carrier announcements use, crystallizes the new reality of voice as an
application. The application provider doesn't need the
cooperation of the network operator, just as eBay or Amazon.com didn't
need to pay America Online for the privilege of offering their sites on
the Web. Of course, the network operators don't like that
separation of applications and transport. That's why they are
pushing for regulatory changes that would allow them to use their
control over last-mile pipes to ban or tax third-party
applications.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 13, 2003
When is a connection not a connection?
Pierre Omidyar and Esther Dyson
both complain about getting spammed by invitations through
business-oriented social networking services such as LinkedIn.
This brings up two fundamental problems with these services.
First, the most connected people need them the least. Esther and
Pierre don't need LinkedIn to reach pretty much anyone they want to
contact. Yet there are a whole lot of folks who want to reach
them, and don't have a personal connection to do so. So the
service worsens their email overload with little corresponding benefit.
I'm somewhat in the same boat. I'm certainly not as well-known as
Esther and Pierre, but I have a pretty good network in the tech
industry. I haven't yet found a situation where LinkedIn got me
to someone I couldn't reach directly, by Googling for an email address,
or by guessing a mutual connection.
The second problem is that the social networking services don't have a
field for "do I really know this individual personally?" Having
someone's email address in Outlook isn't necessarily a proxy for a
relationship. Yesterday I got a request through Spoke to forward
an invitation to Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist. I
knew both the sender and the next person in the chain, and the request
was reasonable, so I forwarded it on. The recipient wrote back to
say that his only link to Krugman was sending him one email last year
commenting on a column. Krugman never responded. Not
exactly a "trusted connection."
If these services really want to be useful for business networking,
they will have to incorporate features that add more granularity and
control. The challenge is that doing so requires more effort on
the part of the participants, which mitigates the benefits the services
provide in the first place.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 12, 2003
Another threat to the Net...
...is creeping re-centralization and control of bottlenecks by a few
gatekeepers. We're seeing this in broadband, where the phone and
cable companies that own the physical infrastructure of the last mile
want regulatory dispensation to dominate broadband and voice over
IP. And we're seeing it from Verisign, which wants to leverage
its control of the .com registry and other key leverage points to
dominate the "logical layer" of the Internet. Ross Mayfield reports on Versign CEO Stratton Sclavos' comments to this effect at the Red Herring conference this week.
Stratton is a smart guy and a good businessperson. I don't think
Verisign is evil, and they make a reasonable argument that no part of
the Internet should be immune from innovation. However, they still
don't seem to understand that the way they went about implementing
SiteFinder was an affront to the basic tenets of Internet
architecture. And if Stratton thinks Verisign's best strategy is
centralization of the Net with itself at the middle, he's going to put
his company on a collision course with most of the Internet industry
and community.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 11, 2003
The FCC's Sneak Attack on VOIP... and the Real Issue
Jeff Pulver has a good piece on CNet about the FCC's actions on voice over IP.
I think it's appropriate for the FCC to consider the issues that
VOIP raises, especially with state regulators already jumping in and
imposing unnecessary regulation. But I agree with Jeff that they
shouldn't do so by sneak attack. FCC Chairman Powell is
apparently even considering ruling on some of the VOIP issues before
starting a public rulemaking proceeding. That's the wrong way to
go about addressing this important set of questions.
As I said at the FCC VOIP hearing last week, the real issue is the
transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a
subset of the Internet. That means treating voice as an
application that can run on any platform, not as the platform
itself. The regulatory status of VOIP is just the tip of the
iceberg.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 10, 2003
The music piracy peril?
I used to think the music industry was more thoughtful than Hollywood
when it came to digital distribution, even though they faced a more
imminent threat from peer-to-peer file sharing. Now I'm not so
sure. If the music industry's main argument is that file sharing
is immoral and a crime, it may provoke mass civil disobedience.
The mainstream of Americans don't feel that way.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 8, 2003
Birth of the Metaweb
Nova Spivak describes RSS
as the Next Big Thing in a provocative essay. His stealth
startup, Radar Networks, is developing a cool platform to make smart
metadata a reality.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Battle of ICANN
The New York Times reports that, as expected, ICANN's failure is encouraging the UN to attempt a governmental takeover of the Internet:
It's worrisome that ICANN insiders still think the best response is to insist that ICANN is just a boring technical coordination body. If that were the case, ICANN wouldn't have nearly the influence, visibility, and funding level it enjoys. The Times story leads off by calling ICANN "the Internet's semi-official governing body," which isn't correct but is sufficiently well-accepted that it hardly matters.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 2, 2003
VOIP hearing coverage
Stories about yesterday's FCC VOIP hearing on Infoworld and CBS MarketWatch. C-SPAN has the video from the event here; my opening statement starts 35 minutes in.
As an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal noted, though the discussion
may seem dull and technical, this is an exceptionally important set of
issues for the future of the communications and Internet
industries.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 1, 2003
FCC VOIP Forum testimony
I'm in the FCC meeting room, connected using the Commission's WiFi
access points, listening to the second panel of the FCC VOIP
hearing. My remarks from the first panel this morning is here, and the PowerPoint presentation is here. The discussion went about as I expected, raising issues about regulation, technology, and universal service.
This is just the starting gun for the FCC's examination of VOIP.
It's an extremely important issue for the future of the Internet, and I
look forward to being involved as things unfold.
--------
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack